The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

The Microsphere Is Not All Good

Trivial Pursuit

The most common criticism of microblogging is the trivial nature of most posts (see Figure 13.2). Most people perusing the Internet really don’t care if someone is about to eat their dinner or is currently waiting for a plane. The ease of use and the lack of cost encourage people to become tweeting maniacs, and people tend to lose a sense of responsibility by continuously tweeting about the most mundane occurrences in their day-to-day lives. When you are following 500, 1,000, or 5,000 tweeters—as well as receiving mobile telephone text messages, voicemails (home, office, and cell), news aggregators, snail mail, junk mail, and spam—it can create social media overload. Some people who thrive on social media are so fanatical that they’ve essentially overloaded themselves with too much data. They are receiving information as a steady stream of noise that has made it nearly impossible to contact or communicate with them. Their e-mail is full and won’t accept any more memos; their outgoing cell phone message asks that you “please don’t leave me a voice mail, because I don’t retrieve them anymore” (and the recording is full anyway); and they no longer respond to their tweets.

FIGURE 13.2 Twitter Tweets

In March of 2010, a study by Retrevo revealed our true social media obsession. Retrevo reported, “We were not surprised to learn how many ...